Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 08:21:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: humanism and anti-humanism




“There is something horribly phoney about this stuff, in that 

it would Take all of five minutes to rewrite Stirner or Spivak 

in terms of high liberalist humanism. An 'antihumanist' who o

pposes humanism because it does damage to humanity is nothing 

of the sort”

 

Come off it Thiago!

 

Stirner’s critique of humanism is not that it does damage to 

humanity, but that each of us is a singularity irreducible to 

any category, so no category can operate as a political goal 

without becoming oppressive.  His claims are made, not on 

behalf of “man”, but on behalf of the “un-man”, i.e. that which 

is repressed by the “human” and “humanism”.

 

This echoes with the semiotic point that any concept requires 

an opposite: the “human” as a concept only makes sense if 

differentiated from something else, such as the “un-man”, because

 language is a differential structure.  In other words, the west

 with its concept of the “human”, however apparently universal 

this is, requires enemies who represent the “un-man” or the 

“inhuman”, because otherwise the concept wouldn’t make sense.

 

And of course it’s the people who define what counts as “human” 

who get to decide that it’s themselves who express the essence 

of the human against all the rest.  This is the important point 

in Spivak etc. – for instance, the “primitive” can be inscribed 

as “animal-like” if the “civilised” is taken as characteristic 

of the “human”.

 

So why not something like Stirner?  Or a better example, because

 I think Stirner backslides at times, would be Deleuze and 

Guattari – the flows of desire exceeding their inscription 

within striated assemblages.  Better in any case than 

re-inscribing ourselves as defenders of a human essence, 

which must necessarily be prescriptive and which puts the 

theorist in the position of legislator of ethics.

 

The difficulty of imagining a politics beyond humanism is just 

a difficulty of realising that you are yourself something more 

than, something irreducible to, the category of the “human”.  

Is this really such a challenge?



		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs 

--- StripMime Warning --  MIME attachments removed --- 
This message may have contained attachments which were removed.

Sorry, we do not allow attachments on this list.

--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- 
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
---


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---